News

Simon Yates finishes 12th on the final TT stage to secure second overall at the Tour de Romandie

Sun 30 Apr 2017

Yesterday’s stage winner Simon Yates raced to 12th place on today’s final time trial stage in the Tour de Romandie to secure second place overall after a solid six-day’s of racing.

The 24-year-old started the stage as the overall race leader but with a smaller buffer of 19seconds ahead of Australian Richie Porte (BMC).

Primo Roglic (Lotto-Jumbo) completed the 18.3kilometre race against the clock with a time of 24minutes and 58seconds to take the stage victory, with Porte completing the distance 40seconds faster than Yates to steal the tour victory.

The young Brit did enough to secure a well earnt second place after a strong week of consistent results from ORICA-SCOTT.

“Finishing 12th on the stage is actually an excellent time trial for Simon,” explained sport director Neil Stephens. “He put a lot of effort into today and he really wanted to do it for himself and all the people that support him."

"He put out great wattage and in the end there wasn’t any more he could do. He can walk away feeling satisfied, he didn’t make any mistakes and in the second half of the time trial he didn’t lose any time at all so he was just beaten by a better rider today."

The day wraps up a successful week for ORICA-SCOTT, achieving a victory on stage one with local rider Michael Albasini, consistent placings with Alex Edmondson’s with a third place in the opening prologue and two fourth place finishes, plus the phenomenal stage four victory yesterday with Yates and capped off his a second place overall.

“We came here hoping to do well on the GC so to actually run second is fantastic,” Stephens continued. “The stage only finished now, we’ve only just lost the overall lead and the race so that is hard to digest but the reality is we have achieved a lot more than we could have hoped for this week.”

“So we are obviously happy with that, once again Romandie was a great race and a great race for us this year. I think the team took another step forward in working for the general classification so it was a very satisfying week all round.”

How it happened:

The final stage of the 2017 Swiss tour concluded with a 18.3kilometre race against the clock today. With the top general classification contenders still fairly close together after a shake up in yesterday’s Queen stage, the tour was action packed right until the very last moment.

Riders completed the distance one by one with the time to beat constantly changing. It was Tejay van Gardeneren (BMC) who sat in the hotseat right until the final moments, eventually being pushed down to third place after Roglic and Porte surpassed his time.

Yates the final rider to start, as the current leader of the race, had a 18.3kilometre challenge ahead of him knowing he only had a small advanatge of 19seconds ahead of Porte to battle for the overall victory.

After the half way mark, Yates was 33seconds down on Porte but continued to fight all the way until, riding out of his skin in an event that isn’t his forte.

Eventually the ORICA-SCOTT rider stopped the clock with a time of 25minute and 46second, good enough for 12th and to secure a well fought out second place overall in the 2017 edition of the Swiss race.